Jake Luer is a Node.js developer and consultant focused on building the next generation of mobile and web applications. He is logicalparadox on GitHub and @jakeluer on Twitter. Node.js is a JavaScript platform built on Google Chrome’s v8 runtime. Node’s website states that it “uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model,” but what does that mean? As an example, in the case of a web server, when a request is made, it will set up an asynchronous listener for when the code has prepared a response. During that time, the application can process more incoming requests, read the file system or perform database actions, all without blocking I/O of the process thread. This makes Node.js perfect for distributed, real-time applications. Node has grown beyond buzz in recent months to become the go-to technology for rapid and highly scalable web application deployment. It is currently...